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Lucas Samaras at PaceWildenstein - Brief Article
Art in America, April, 2002 by Edward Leffingwell
Between 1999 and 2001, Lucas Samaras produced the arsenal of acrylic paintings and painted objects for this exhibition, succinctly titled "Paint." There were paint-smeared abstracted landscapes, canvases with acrylic strokes that resemble painted wounds, bowls and cutting boards thickly dabbed with paint, stylized views through the windows of his high-rise apartment. There were painted cylinders bigger than Foster lager cans and painted kitchen flatware twisted into dragonflies. In notes prepared to accompany the exhibition, Samaras writes that he has tried to get beyond the modern masters, regarding the objects of their production as "roadkill" along the path of his journey.
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Samaras being Samaras, presentation takes more than a supporting role in the experience of the things themselves--these pure and brilliant jewels of bright alizarin laid down on an intensity of lapis, purest yellows, black and gold. Facing the immediate problem of where to put all of them, Samaras divided the gallery into quadrants with partition walls meeting in an X shape in the center of the one enormous room, allowing a generous aisle between the central configuration and the perimeter of the gallery. The open hypotenuse of each resulting triangle faced one of the gallery walls, and the walls of the X provided two additional hanging surfaces while making it impossible to see the entirety of the exhibition from any single viewpoint. Each of the four resulting display units rested on platforms scattered with objects, while objects-in-the-form-of-paintings were displayed in grids on every surface. Finally, as though tying up his effort with a ribbon, Samaras categorized the works in a broad band of text running friezelike in continuous white on black around the room at ceiling's edge. The point of all this architecture, however, was the pyrotechnics of the paint itself, slathered on everything he had made, both large and small.
Samaras commemorated the exhibition with a slim dove-gray box containing a prose poem, printed one word to the line on 27 unbound pages. Written between June and September 2001, it serves as a State of Samaras address prepared by an insistently contrary artist on the achievement of his 65th birthday. It begins with a stow about the construction of a tower that threatens to block from his view a sliver of Manhattan and the river to the west of the midtown building where he works and lives on the 62nd floor. The lamentation concludes as he watches the World Trade towers burn and fall, opening up another slice of harbor to the south. On the second day of the disaster, Samaras writes, he made four paintings in an act of renascence and then took to his studio couch for a nap, which he called a rehearsal for oblivion.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group
